Assignment: New York.

Cafe Provides Homeless A Leg Up In Society

February 09, 1995|By Kenneth R. Clark, Tribune Staff Writer.

NEW YORK — For Walter Hardgraves, the lure of One City Cafe, where he buys his meals with food stamps, is the price.

"I can eat lunch here for $2," said Hardgraves, a fine-art photography historian thrown onto public assistance in June by a stroke that left him unable to work. "I went for dinner the other day and had a huge meal. In food stamps, it only cost me $4."

For Patsy Roth, who pays twice the food stamp rate, it's a matter of performing a community service while she eats, "which is something I have to do anyway."

"I'd like to see more of these kinds of places where people on welfare are actually being put back into the community," said Roth, who lives nearby. "Even if it had shortcomings, I'd support it."

One City Cafe is a brave little experiment its founders hope will spread as Congress considers massive cuts in welfare.

The cafe, opened little more than a month ago in north Greenwich Village, is the only full-service, white-tablecloth, sit-down restaurant in the city that both feeds the poor for a pittance and trains the poor, at $7 an hour, for jobs in the food-service industry.

The not-for-profit operation is the brainchild of Ellen Rosenthal, a "working anthropologist" who sees the cafe both as a community service and as a laboratory for study of the human condition.

"For me, this is a perfect marriage, an intellectual endeavor as well as an entrepreneurial endeavor-a combination of theory and practice," she said. "Anthropologists very rarely get to create the alternative response to what they are theoretically critiquing."

But Rosenthal is no ivory tower elitist. She serves as executive director of the city's Food and Hunger Hotline, and has fought in the trenches of homelessness and poverty for 12 years. One City Cafe is her answer to instutionalized soup kitchens where "there is never enough to go around."

Rosenthal opened One City Cafe with private money-$180,000 from a Bruce Springstein concert and $150,000 raised by Gourmet magazine.

She chose a restaurant for her "alternative to public assistance" after learning in a survey of venture capitalists that food service is the fastest growing industry in the nation. She then polled women in homeless shelters as to what kind of food they really want. To the surprise of some, it was not junk food.

"They said, `Please don't make it a cafeteria; we stand on line and get food slopped at us all the time,' " said Francine Cohen, Rosenthal's chief spokeswoman. "They wanted full-service, with china and glassware, and lots of fruits and vegetables."

The menu at One City Cafe reflects that, with a large array of soups, salads and vegetables in dishes with a distinct Latin flavor. The runaway house favorite is "Ropa Vieja," Spanish for "Old Clothes" because of the ragged appearance of the succulent pot roast. With two side dishes the price is $7 cash, $3.50 in food stamps.

One City also offers wine and beer, although not for food stamps.

But the soul of the operation lies less on the menu than in the people who work there. Six trainees, all from the ranks of public assistance, are learning the restaurant business in a hands-on fashion calculated to take them out of dependency and into the work force.

Training chef Paul Markosian, a 17-year-veteran of the restaurant business, said he came aboard "because I wanted the opportunity to do something besides just cook food."

"It sounded great to be teaching people in a restaurant that would be serving people with food stamps," he said. "This is an on-the-job-training program where we put them in positions where we're depending on them to do the job. They have to show up on time, they've got to keep up the pace; and it's working."

It definitely is working for Antoinette Crawford, a single mom who lived in a women's shelter for seven months, and who has struggled to support her son on minimum wage in various fast-food outlets.

"Given the background I already have, I think I can further my chances of escalating from floor staff to management level," she said.

One City Cafe, which at the moment can afford to operate only four days a week, has the capacity to train 40 people a year-an admitted drop in the ocean of 100,000 homeless people estimated to live on the sidewalks of New York. And because the homeless are hard to contact-Rosenthal is trying to recruit them at various city shelters-food stamp customers make up scarcely 10 percent of the cafe's receipts to date.

Rosenthal has moral support from Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the city's Coalition for the Homeless.

"I'm very intrigued by the idea," she said. "It's exactly what we need-legitimate training programs that tap into a job base."

Rosenthal, who would like to see a cafe like One City in every neighborhood, agrees.

"Believing it's just willpower that is going to get people jobs is just plain foolish," she said.